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Friday, October 12, 2012

Fun Fact Friday: US Waterboarding in the Philippines

During the Philippine-American War, or the "Philippine Insurrection" as falsely stated by US textbooks, allegations of US military atrocities began to appear in the United States from concerned soldiers, who of course requested anonymity.

One of the allegations was the use of the "water cure", where prisoners were forced to intake large amounts of water to extract confessions. This practice along with evidence of "reconcentration" camps and massacres created public condemnation of the war.

The American military was on the defensive and William Howard Taft even stated that some Pilipinos had asked to be tortured so that their confessions looked to have been forced out of them. Some claimed that Pilipinos performed it on each other and brought "evidence" of how uncivilized the Pilipino soldiers were, claiming that civil warfare was not in order because the enemy was not "civilized".